Cosmological dynamics in f(R) gravity

Understand

In this paper, we study the cosmological viability conditions, the phase-space dynamics, and the cosmological evolution of f(R) gravity.

• In contrast to most previous works in the literature, which analyzed the background dynamics of f(R) gravity by means of a dynamical system, we proceed by focusing on the equivalent scalar field description of the theory, which we believe is a more intuitive way of treating the problem.
• In order to study how the physical solutions evolve in f(R) cosmology, we explore the cosmological dynamics of a range of f(R) models, including models that yield a large hierarchy of scales and are singularity free.
• We present generic features of the phase-space dynamics in f(R) cosmology.